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Fans cheer on the Blue Jays during a marathon Game 3 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium on Monday.Barbara Davidson/The Globe and Mail
Jamie Campbell isn’t entirely sure when he realized that he and his fellow Sportsnet broadcasters, along with millions of Canadians, were in for an epic night of baseball on Monday, as the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers tangled for 18 innings in Game 3 of the World Series. But he thinks it might have been around the time the temperature in Dodger Stadium began to plummet.
At 4 p.m. PT when he, Madison Shipman and Joe Siddall began their one-hour pre-game show on a concourse overlooking right field, “the California sun was beating down on us, and I was in a suit and it was noticeably warm. It was sauna-like on the set,” he recalled. As the game progressed and the teams traded blows, the marine layer began to settle in around the stadium. “And it suddenly got cold.”
“I don’t remember what moment it was, because there is the added mental strain of having grown up as a fan of the Blue Jays, knowing that the fan in me wants them to win the game. So I was locked in on every pitch.”
Campbell was speaking on Tuesday, less than 11 hours after Jays fans had their hearts broken by a Freddie Freeman walk-off home run, and he sounded as if he was still trying to process what he’d been a part of, a broadcast he says is an instant “top-three career highlight.”
Toronto Blue Jays fans pushed their bedtimes to watch the Blue Jays-Dodgers game, which tied the record for the most innings in World Series history.
The Canadian Press
It was exhausting, being dialled in for eight hours straight. “But the 14-year-old boy inside of me showed up during Game 3 and reminded the 58-year-old me how incredible this is, and how hard I worked for this opportunity to be a part of such a broadcast,” he said.
“It was like a childhood dream come true for me, just to be part of it. So, all I needed to do throughout during the inevitable fatigue was to remind myself of that. And be grateful.”
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The way it ended, he acknowledged, “was sad and disappointing, but with a very small tinge of relief based on the fact that everybody gets to go to bed now.”
The thing you have to understand about being a part of the TV broadcast of one of the longest games in World Series history is that you don’t know before it begins that you’ll be a part of the TV broadcast of one of the longest games in World Series history. That possibility only occurs to you as the innings stretch on and neither team is scoring and you creep across the four- or five-hour mark of what ends up being a 6:39-hour marathon that you’d originally figured would be more like the series of high-intensity sprints that is live sports production.
Troy Clara, a longtime producer-director with Sportsnet, had directed long baseball broadcasts before helming Monday’s game, which concluded at 2:51 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning.
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Fans stand during the 14th inning. Jays fans had their hearts broken by a walk-off home run for the Dodgers in the 18th.Ashley Landis/The Associated Press
Monday was different. As millions of Canadians stayed up past their bedtimes to take in an instant classic, Clara chugged coffee and kept up a monologue for almost seven hours, calling the shots from his camera people that he wanted to go out to TV screens across the nation. About five hours into the game, they ordered in a load of food for the crew in the production truck. Not that there was much time to eat. “During the commercial break, you’ll fire back a couple of bites of a burger or a sandwich and get back at it,” he said.
With the game crawling into the higher extra innings, Clara’s camera operators captured scenes that gave viewers a sense of the anxious exhaustion taking hold in the stadium: fans stifling yawns, tense faces, seat tables along the first baseline piled high with food and beverage containers that had accumulated through the night.
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That exhaustion began to hit the crew, too, and Clara needed to rally the troops.
“I did give a ‘bear-down’ speech, I think that might have been around the 14th inning,” he said. “The camera guys and our videotape operators doing the replays, I noticed a couple of them maybe weren’t hunting as much between pitches – hunting for that shot of the fan praying, or hunting for that shot of the guy in the dugout, you know, looking dejected or whatever it might be. I think from that point on, nobody let up.”
Even so, the physical and mental strain began to take its toll.
Game 3 will go down as the marathon game at the 2025 World Series, with Freddie Freeman’s walkoff homer in the 18th inning giving the L.A. Dodgers a 6-5 victory and 2-1 edge on the Toronto Blue Jays.
The Canadian Press
In the top of the 18th inning, the colour commentator Buck Martinez fumbled something he was saying about the Blue Jays catcher Tyler Heineman, who was coming up to bat. He corrected himself, explaining, “My pages are running together.” His co-worker Dan Shulman chuckled and said, “You’re forgiven. A-for-effort that you’re still trying.”
A few innings before that, Clara had asked a camera operator to get a shot of the next batter.
“I saw the camera whip over and I knew where the guy was standing, it might have been Ohtani on deck, and he’s a pretty large fellow and he’s standing right there. And I could see as the camera is panning back and forth and up and down, and he’s looking all over, I could see he can’t find them. And he told me afterwards, his eyes had just gone bleary and everything was one mushy colour and he couldn’t tell one from another.”
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Still, Clara was grateful to be a part of it. In 1992, during the Jays’ first World Series run, he was just a fan who lived in Thunder Bay. When the team won, “we all spilled out of the brewpub on Red River Road in Port Arthur and filled the streets celebrating, just like everybody else right across the country. So now to be here and doing this? It’s all an experience. It’s all the best.”
And shooting in Dodger Stadium is a treat. “The backgrounds are unbelievable and you have a drone flying over, we had a helicopter flying above, and when you’re seeing shots like that, for television people, it gets you excited.” At the end of the game, Clara looked to his technical director and said, “Man, that was a long game – almost five hours.”
It was actually more than six and a half.
“I had no idea.”
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The Dodgers’ 6-5 win over the Blue Jays tied the record for the longest World Series game ever.David J. Phillip/The Associated Press
